FAQ about videos going into Canvas
- David Sprunger
One of the chief reasons faculty are concerned with putting videos into Canvas is in how students are/are not able to access video content from inside China. This FAQ addresses those questions and more.
Q: Can Chinese students get into Canvas?
A: Yes, though the Chinese government could change their mind.
Q: Can Chinese students get into YouTube or other Google apps/services
A: No. There are a ton of online services they can't access.
Q: Do we really have to break up our videos into small pieces in order to post them on Canvas? If so, how small? What is the exact limit on file size?
A: Only if your video(s) is larger than 500 MB-- and this is because of the specific method you need to follow to "embed" video into Canvas (see the tutorial page above). True, you can upload videos into your Canvas course Files, but you will quickly run into storage caps.
Q: Ok, so can we increase the storage caps of Canvas?
A: In a word, no. Earlier I did say "we can but it's really expensive," but it turns out I misspoke. Instructure (makers of Canvas) will not sell us more storage. They have set up their business around not doing much housing of large files. Earlier this year, we already begged them for more storage and they relented, but noted that no more was allowable. According to Instructure, we are already as much as four times the amount of storage space they have allotted to many major higher ed institutions-- we're lucky to have the storage we have now!
Q: What about posting our videos to a Chinese version of YouTube, like YouKu, Bilibili, or something else? Could we do that?
A: We aren't certain about this. Early reports suggest that even if we can, the interface for these sites is completely in Chinese, which will make it hard for many (most?) of us to successfully upload and manage our videos. We are also unaware if there are restrictions on uploading videos to these sites from outside of China. We need more time to investigate this.
Q: Is there trained student help to do this? If so, how do we access them?
A: We're still trying to assemble our student working team for doing this. Part of the challenge is that we don't have a full understanding of the scope of the work-- We have so many questions: How many faculty members have content they need to deliver to the students in China? How much content? Will it be for the whole semester, or just parts? How many of these faculty members can (eventually) be trained to prepare videos on their own? How many will need student labor for the whole semester? Can some departments hire their own students, which we can then train? The questions go on and on. For the immediate needs, we do have a couple students in WCTS and a subset of our full time staff who are reading the same tutorials I posted above and will be on hand to help faculty get through at least the first few weeks. We'll be watching how all this is going and seeing how we-- faculty and staff-- should/can adjust our processes and workflow as we go.
Q: How do I get WCTS' help immediately on getting my videos into Canvas?
A: If you don't have the bandwidth to read the tutorials above and work on this yourself, or you just want some help the first couple of times, or you have questions, email canvas_help@whitman.edu, using a subject line of something like "help getting videos into Canvas."